Experiment!

Vaig néixer a la Mediterrània, 2012

One thing you can do to push your personal frontier as a photographer is to experiment. If you are a landscape photographer, try doing a sit-down portrait of your significant other or a friend. If you are a studio photographer, try doing an abstract landscape. Never done macro? Borrow a macro lens and give it a try. Or, pick a lens you never shoot with and go out on the street and see what you can do. Or how about shoot with nothing but a standard 50mm focal length lens for a week?

When I first began to use a post-processing program, someone gave me the suggestion of pushing those sliders all the way to either extreme just to see what they did and what would happen before settling back to the actual desired effect. Although I never used the sliders at their extremes, it was a great learning experience. If you desire, you can really push your frontiers by tweaking those sliders in strange combinations to come up with some really wild and bizarre images. (Try going every which way with color balance, contrast, hue, and saturation, for example.)

For most folks the image above is not too wild and over the top, however, for me it was an experiment as I am not much of a portrait photographer and I don’t usually overmanipulate my images. However, I wanted to try to capture the deep blue of my wife’s eyes in a unique way and how they reflect the azure of the Mediterranean Sea beside which she was born and raised. I started with a telephoto shot in natural light of just her eyes then converted the image to high key monochrome using the Nik Silver Efex Pro plug-in. I cropped the image tightly and ended up with dimensions I don’t normally use. I left the eyes with color and added some contrast, vibrance and saturation to bring them out even more. The experiment was fun and I like the end result–it has printed well at about 30×12 inches–and I think it does actually make one think of Catalunya and the Mediterranean Sea (well, OK, IMHO!).

As you play around, you will undoubtedly find ways of making images that absolutely do not appeal to you…or, on the other hand, you might actually discover a personal style that really does appeals to you. The idea is to learn and grow as an artist and photographer.

So, what are you waiting for–go out and try something completely different!